Is It a Safe Environment?

Monday, 18 December 2006
By Sabria S Jawahar

The Saudi Gazette

Saudi officials say that the government has intensified its efforts to increase public awareness and encourage individual and group initiatives to protect the environment. However, what strikes me almost daily is the extreme carelessness in protecting our environment along our shores and in big cities.
It has taken the government considerable time to contain the damage along our shores in the Arabian Gulf as a result of the second Gulf War.
The deputy director of the Saudi Presidency of Meteorology and Environment announced this week the ministry’s intention to launch a program to repair environmental damage on the Saudi shorelines along the Arabian Gulf using the $1300 million compensation endorsed by the United Nations following a study on the impact of the war on the environment.
He said spending that money on the treatment of the existing pollution comes on the top of the presidency’s list of priorities.
Despite my excitement with the announcement, I have several questions concerning what have been done since the war began. What role did the national environment committee, established in 1999, play to increase the awareness of people in the region concerning the sources of pollution and how to avoid them?
If generating more public awareness about the environment was among the committee’s general aims, what changes have taken place concerning the environmental conservation policies? We still see practices that cause a lot of damage to the environment and natural resources.
What is worse is that this is all done at the sight of authorities whether the presidency of meteorology and environment or municipality. Moreover, municipalities in big industrial cities like Jeddah are still looking for excuses to get away with allowing diseases to spread as a result of pollution.
When I asked a friend of mine, who specializes in environmental sciences, about the degree of environmental safety in Jeddah, he said, “ If I open my mouth with one word no one will ever live in this artificially beautiful city. Besides, I will lose my job.”
That remark left me no wonder about those unknown diseases appearing recently in Jeddah’s hospitals.
According to the World Bank, Saudi Arabia will have to invest substantial capital in the environmental sector in coming years in order to become more sustainable; the Bank has estimated that the Arab world will need to invest $100 billion in its environmental sector over the next 10 years to protect the environment.
But not even one-fifth of that money has been invested in essential environmental projects. However, what matters is whether officials in the GCC countries are aware of the extent of danger people in the region are exposed due to reluctance in implementing protection measures.
In a Saudi study which published this month, it was confirmed that breast cancer is the most common cancer among Saudi women.
The same study also showed that women in the Eastern Province registered the highest number of reported cases. They comprised of 22 percent of the registered cases according to the national record of cancer at the Ministry of Health. This brings us back to the reasons behind the delay in treating environmental damage along the Gulf shorelines.
An official at a leading company in Saudi Arabia told me that his company stopped buying a certain brand of bottled water after it failed to pass the company’s quality test. He said it was found highly polluted. The official refused to mention the brand of the water, yet he said it comes from an area close to areas exposed to battle during the second Gulf War.
Yet nothing was officially announced about that water, which means that thousands, if not millions, of people were using it in a daily basis. So where was the national environmental committee when they were supposed to supervise factory that produced that water?
To be fair no one denies that in recent years Saudi Arabia has been increasing its efforts to protect the country from various environmental hazards while attempting to balance these concerns with the country’s heavy dependence on hydrocarbon production and export. But officials still must know that environmental protection issues are not limited to production, processing and transportation of oil and natural gas.
Other issues should be included, such as water and sewage infrastructure that has not been kept up with the country’s rapidly growing population in recent decades.
Strategic solutions for cities like Jeddah that have experienced serious problems with pollution by sewage leakage should be found. Time in solving those problems should be highly considered as essential simply because with the passage of each moment some one gets affected by pollution